Koloa Mill – DLWS Scores….again!

Mar 23, 2011 | Landscape Photography

We’ve been working on this since leaving Kauai two years ago, obtaining access into the Koloa Sugar Mill. Long abandoned and in the beginning phase of being recycled, we were incredibly fortunate to have three hours in this photographic treasure! This is the mill for the most part, but it’s massive and this photo doesn’t do it justice!

I haven’t EVEN got all the images edited let alone finished but wanted to get a couple up just to show how cool of a locale this is. It’s not open to the public, there are no tours so the only way you’ll be able to experience it are through all the images captured by the gang this evening. These are a couple of the HDR shots I took while in the broiler control room.

There were more possible photographs then one could begin to capture spending a month at the mill. The play of light on the most simplest of object in this rusty paradise were at every turn. And if that weren’t enough, that crazy HDR junkie RC was doing HDR portraits of folks amongst all this rust. Wow! It was a great evening that we were so fortunate to have available to us and that I’m thrilled to be able to share with you!

Photos captured by D3x, 24-120VR on Lexar UDMA digital film

Grand Canyon of the Pacific

Mar 22, 2011 | Landscape Photography

We are having a GREAT time, so good, and don’t take this personally, I decided to play at the Brew with a Crew then blog. We went up to Waimea Canyon for a grand show of light. Being a canyon and being sunset, the sky was much brighter then the bottom of the canyon. We have a number of options to deal with this large, canyonious void of light, split grad and HDR were the two tracks I went for the evening. With RC here coming off finishing the writing of his new HDR book, I went HDR (since I could follow the steps in the highnoon class). Here’s the results, pretty cool. It’s a gorgeous place and as long as you have the light in place, you have the image.

Photo captured by D3x, 14-24AFS on Lexar UDMA digital film

Opaeka’a Falls – 3rd Attempt

Mar 22, 2011 | Landscape Photography

This morning, we headed to Opaeka’a Falls for our shoot. This was my 3rd time to the falls and I was determined not to come back with the same crap I’d captured before. I looked at my images before coming over of the falls and they really suck. Too much PS used to make up for piss poor technique. It was pitiful!

[swf]http://www.moosepeterson.com/swf_imgs/_BMP9327hdr.swf, 595, 484 [/swf]

The light was kinda flat but the greens have all sorts of shades to them lending to lots of color contrast. So the trick was to first decide on the subject, include those elements that support it while excluding those that don’t. Then it was time based on that info to make the shot.

The top image is a 7 image HDR. It’s OK. The 2nd image is a single image clicked finished in ACR and then using Nik’s Color Efex Darken/Lighten Center.

[swf]http://www.moosepeterson.com/swf_imgs/_BMP92571a.swf, 595, 484 [/swf]

Next is a single image clicked finished in ACR and then using Nik’s Color Efex Darken/Lighten Center. With the next a 7 image HDR finished with a little Glamor Glow.

[swf]http://www.moosepeterson.com/swf_imgs/_BMP96291.swf, 595, 484 [/swf]

This last image which is my favorite (and vast improvement over my last visits) is a single click finished in PS using Darken/Lighten center.

[swf]http://www.moosepeterson.com/swf_imgs/_BMP96461.swf, 595, 484 [/swf]

I moved about 80feet is total changing the view of the falls, including and excluding elements and working HDR. As I talked about with the DLWS gang, zooming in on the falls doesn’t talk about place. If you want a waterfall in HI, you need to include HI. That was the challenge and I’m glad I stuck to my guns to make an image happen. I always feel I’ve accomplished something when I’ve take a bad shoot from the past and erased it with the present. Might be a small step forward, but it’s going in the right direction.

Photos captured by D3x, 24-120VR on Lexar UDMA digital film

Scale!

Mar 21, 2011 | Landscape Photography

Just how big are those cliffs? If you’ve not been there, you wouldn’t know. Without some object we can relate to in the photo, demonstrating the size of a subject can be a challenge. Typically, I have a dime in the photo when I need to show scale but as you might imagine, a dime wouldn’t even show up in the photo,

What happens when you put a 60′ boat in the photo? You really don’t know how big that boat is in real life but when you see it as a micro dot in the bottom of the frame in the lower photo, you get a sense that these are one big ass set of cliffs! And by waiting to click for when your scale, the boat is partially obscured by a wave, you can manipulate the scale to make it look even bigger.

Here’s something to chew on. These days with CS5’s Content Aware file, you can include scale all you want and remove it when you don’t want it in post. This makes it pretty simple to make those scale shots that when you need that extra drama, can really come in handy.

Photos captured by D3x, 70-200VR2 on Lexar UDMA digital film